Some Coronavirus Weirdness, Explained

A friend jokingly listed the following “coronavirus weirdness” that she’s seen others succumb to since the pandemic began back in March:

• Hoarding toilet paper
• Buying beans, rice, yeast, and flour, even though they don’t know how to cook or bake
• Becoming a sour dough bread baker
• Adopting dogs, and sometimes cats, from shelters
• Starting gardening, even if all you can manage are some tomatoes in a pot
• Buying guns and freezers

And here are a few of my own:

• “Quarantine snacking” 
• The Tiger King phenomenon
• Alternating between “you MUST use this time to be productive” and “take advantage of this time to slow down and unwind and destress”

I promised my friend a mental health reality check explaining the why behind all these crazy coronavirus/quarantine induced behaviors, and here it is. Ready to find out why you’ve been doing some of this weird and wacky stuff? Let’s go!

1. Hoarding of toilet paper: We all do three things pretty much every day - we eat, we sleep, and we go potty. We’ve been familiar with toilet paper since we’ve been toilet trained as toddlers. Toilet paper is as associated with basic self care as it comes. And unlike food and bottled water and other “essential” supplies, there really is no generally available substitute for it. 

There’s also a basic hygiene need that is met by toilet paper. Without it, you aren’t really sanitary. In a health crisis, the last thing we want is any hint of being unclean, unsanitary, because that could lead to health issues, something to avoid in a pandemic, right? 

So, when we were told that we may have to be stuck inside our homes for weeks or even months, we wanted the comfort of knowing that there were plenty of rolls to see us through. 

Some may have even felt a sense of being responsible by buying out the shelf - THEY were taking care of THEIR family in a very real, tangible, grownup way. Toilet paper came to symbolize the comfort and security of meeting basic needs in an insecure, uncertain time.

2. Beans, rice, flour, yeast: The same sentiment and comfort we associated with toilet paper led many to buy “basic” foodstuffs that they had no real idea of how to use. Every emergency preparedness list from the Cub Scouts to the Red Cross to FEMA mentions nonperishable foods, and even CNN’s experts suggested basics like rice and beans and flour. 

Again, we felt we were meeting basic human needs for survival. I suppose most felt they could always look up recipes on the internet once they got their legumes and grains home.

3. Sourdough and the whole quarantine baking fad: There are several psychological reasons behind the nation’s sudden obsession with baking. On the most basic level, baking takes focus and time. With many people out of work, they had plenty of time on their hands and the process of baking helped to fill up those suddenly empty hours. It also provided a form of escape. The hours spent in the kitchen were time spent on thinking about something other than the scary world outside and all the scarier news about it. 

On a more advanced level, baking makes one feel productive. And the typically carb-loaded finished products provide a culinary comfort. These two combined fulfilled some emotional needs quarantine and the shut downs stripped from us. 

As to the sour dough craze - I can only guess that as yeast supplies dwindled, people remembered that you didn’t need it to produce some pretty tasty baked goods, and things just escalated from there. 

Baking - and cooking - also created communal opportunities for many. Home chefs and bakers shared recipes, experiences, “happy hours” and even tasting parties via Instagram and other social media platforms, and even in Zoom meetups.

4. Adopting pets: After a couple of weeks of working from home, or being unemployed, and having no social interactions that didn’t come through a screen, many began to feel lonely and isolated. Some also looked for ways to entertain their newly unschooled, unsocializing kids. It was only natural that we should seek solace and friendship where we could find it, even if that meant the local rescue shelter..

 So many sought the company of a pet to see them through the quarantine time that some animal shelters were left empty or nearly empty. You could, after all, order online all the pet supplies you needed, and didn’t need, and your new best friend provided hours of companionship and time-occupying activities like walks, fetch, cuddling, and once again, comfort.

5. Gardening: Again, there’s not just one single answer as to why our stressed and quarantine weary souls turned to turning the soil. As one writer put it, to grow and preserve food is to remember that life goes on. It ensures that we have something to look forward to, a future that is brighter and better than the current state. 

Gardening also consumes a good bit of time - preparing the soil, planting the seeds, watering and weeding, caring for the plants, harvesting the produce, consuming or preserving the bounty. And again, time is something most suddenly had a lot of on their hands. 

Then, there’s the science behind why gardening is so pleasing to us. There are microbes in the soil that actually lower our blood pressure and reduce stress. The process of gardening increases cognitive (brain) functions and improves our attention and focus. We are physically better for having a bit of dirt under our fingernails and a few tomatoes in a pot on the patio or balcony. 

Lastly, many lost their opportunities to care for others during the quarantine. Their circle of caring was greatly reduced to just their family members, or smaller, to themselves and their new dog. The nurturing nature of caring for seedlings and soil, for lovingly growing something from scratch, eased an ache in many hearts that isolation couldn’t.

6. Guns and freezers: Frightened people do weird and irrational things. Many saw buying guns and ammo as a way to provide physical security in a scary, uncertain, divided world. I would suspect that buying freezers was a lot like buying rice and beans - they could now stock up on perishables like meat, vegetables, and milk for the unforeseen and unforeseeable future. There again, segments like the one CNN did with their experts urging buying and freezing milk before supply lines became disrupted only fueled those fears. 

Both types of purchases may have been seen, again, as responsible and mature “adulting” things to do. You were prepared for whatever eventuality might come your way. 

7. Quarantine snacking: If memes and advertisements are any indication of the health of our modern society, we apparently threw everything we knew about nutrition and healthy eating out the window in the first few weeks of the shut down. We were eating ALL THE THINGS and relishing in it. Our quarantine snacking can be attributed to three things: a need for comfort, a need to fight boredom, and surprisingly, a need for control. 

We were scared. We were stressed. We were living with a great deal of uncertainty. We sought comfort wherever we could get it. And if that meant it was in the bottom of the ice cream tub or chip bag or cookie jar, so be it. Carbs, especially, are comforting. They fill us up and make us feel good. For many, the simple process of eating is comforting. It is satisfying a basic need, whether needed or not, and the brain chemicals released form a sort of high that is tough to beat when you’re stressed off your feet.

We were bored. And when bored, we often eat and overeat. It’s something to do. It’s very sensual, involving all of our senses. We are at our most “alive” when we are munching away, in many ways. Eating gave us something pleasurable to do to fill all that unpleasant empty time the virus added to our otherwise busy schedules. 

Lastly, we needed some way of exerting control over our lives. So much of our everyday control had been stripped from us - no need for alarm clocks, no need for schedules, no need for calendars and planners and agendas. We were pretty much stuck in one place, with little control over what happened to us. We could, however, control what happened inside those walls. That explains the snacking. We could choose what to eat, when to eat it, how much to it, and why we were eating it. Even where, as many have said they ate in places, like in bed, where they didn’t typically snack ever. So what may have looked like a loss of control was actually an exercise in control. 

8. The Tiger King: The entire Tiger King phenomenon can be explained with three things - a good story, a good presentation of that story, and perfect timing for that presentation. 

The Tiger King revolves around and involves so many things: crime, a feud, larger than life characters, abnormal behaviors, and exotic animals. All of these have been the subjects of countless other documentaries and scripted series. And all of them are completely fascinating to us humans. We love crime because most can’t imagine ever acting so beyond the pale of society. We love feuds because we can take sides and determine an “other” - a primal necessary for survival. We love larger than life characters because inside of us, we all crave for the sort of attention and appeal they have. We are fascinated by abnormal behaviors because, again, most of us can only imagine what it must be like to be that outside the norm. And exotic animals enchant us with their beauty, their foreignness, and in this case, their strength and inherent dangerousness. It all adds up to an irresistible story we want more and more of. 

The way the show was produced and presented only added to its appeal for us. The writers knew what they were doing and needed to do to keep us glued to the screen. The same way we turn page after page in a well-written detective or thriller novel, we couldn’t turn off or turn away. There was no getting around it - once we started watching, we had to binge all the way to the end. 

Lastly, there was the whole “perfect timing” aspect of the show’s premiere. Whether or intentional or not on the part of Netflix, a bored, restless, stressed world of their viewers suddenly found something that satisfied their need for both entertainment and escape. They hit the jackpot. It was also a great way to kill an entire day without feeling too guilty. After all, everyone else was doing it, right? One has to wonder if Tiger King had dropped last March if it would’ve found the same literally captive audience and become the hit that it has?

9. Productivity vs. Peace: There were memes and articles and news show segments all about how to best spend your time in quarantine. They basically took two sides - either use the time to get busy, or get busy enjoying the time. 

Some said that you should use the time to be as productive and creative as you could. They referenced Shakespeare writing plays during a plague in London that had closed down the Globe. They spoke of uninterrupted time to finally get to all those projects you’d been stressing about having to put off. There were articles that gave all sorts of hacks and tips for getting the most out of every day and every situation. 

And then there was the opposite side of the fence, that was saying life was hectic and stressful enough. Just sit on the couch and watch another Tiger King. Or go to the kitchen and whip up another pan of brownies if you felt the need to do something. But for heaven’s sake, forget the French lessons and the half finished novel and just relax, will ya?

Both sides were and still are correct. Some people needed the busyness of new projects and endeavors to help them through the situation. Some people needed the downtime and mental break that the quarantine provided. Some people found they had periods where they needed one and then the other, as the pendulum of their stress levels and coping mechanisms swung back and forth. It was the time for the coronavirus weirdness, after all. 

The Good News

The good news is that whether you suffered from any, or even all, of these weird and wonderful behaviors, or invented a few uniquely yours, it’s all perfectly normal and understandable. We humans are weird and wonderful on the most “normal” of days. Give us a worldwide pandemic and shelter-in-place orders, and shut down the outside world while we’re shut up inside, and it’s a wonder we didn’t get weirder with it.

And hey, if one or more of the healthier corona fads - the baking, the gardening, the self care, the future planning - becomes a new habit, then you got something pretty special out of a pretty weird and world changing time. Until next time…..